Wednesday, December 21, 2011

It was interesting to be back in Naperville for a couple weeks. It’s not Chicago but the media is Chicago. It isn’t small-town old Naperville anymore either, so now its doings make the city papers and newscasts regularly, and I see no ex-classmates when visiting, though last time back I did see my cousin who was visiting from Phoenix and met her son who plays in a Norwegian black metal band.

I only went into the city once to see a terrible little movie about an aging small-timer played by Dennis Farina. He’s always fine but having nothing to work with I was struck by the fact of his participation, not to mention Steppenwolf Theater’s, Tribeca Films’ and the rave review it got in the Sun-Times by Roger Ebert. Maybe he gives everything at the Gene Siskel Theater a rave, I’m not sure, but judging all that plus the sellout crowd of actual Chicagoans its clear the Big Town is fully trapped in the aspic of its own self-image, imagined as what others think of the place. The not-New York-or-L.A. but neither one of those other lesser NFL franchisees. Watching the film I kept thinking how Bullet on a Wire was ten times better a dime to the dollar. (One of our actors, Rex Benson, died a month ago, the obit ran two NVs back.)

We weren’t in the city long because my sister drives like she’s still in Beijing. Her husband drove back so that he could be certain we hit Johnnie’s Italian Beef in Elmwood Park or maybe Forest Park or Oak Park. Well worth the detour.

I look at the Tribune and Sun-Times websites when in Wyoming but getting the papers in hand for two weeks gives one a better sense of where they are in their individual glide paths to Pulitzer’s heaven. The Trib is not well and so much national and international news is credited “from Tribune papers,” or “from Tribune wires,” that you wonder whether they have any bureaus anywhere. And the Sun-Times seems to exist on the fumes of Colonel McCormick hatred, which come to think of it powers the Trib too. I pick both up at a Starbucks along with the New York Times (WSJ and FT come to my parents’ house). I was telling an ex-neighbor of ours that it seems as if there are just five bylines that keep the Sun-Times a real newspaper; they are good ones though. I left him the Weekend section with Dave Hoekstra’s Chaka Khan feature which I linked to last week; it was full of local band names from the soul-rock scene circa 1970 (Baby Huey & the Babysitters, Rotary Connection…) that had minor if not purely local hits. Hoekstra’s one of those bylines; my friend knows him and says he lives in Naperville.

There’s plenty of interesting local news and Illinois competes with California and New York for pride of place in the Greek sweepstakes. Illinois is the odds-on favorite unless New York really decides to leave its gas in the ground unfracked. For human interest the papers and newscasts got to set aside politics to observe the death of Maggie Daley. Her cancer being the reason the mayor didn’t run for a seventh term. I will always remember Mrs Daley the younger for her ill-advised beautification campaign which seemed obsessed for quite awhile on tearing down newsdealer sheds throughout the city. She brought the entire weight of the machine down on the poor guy who’d just paid alot in 1984 for the 70 year-old world-class news-shed that stood on the sidewalk north of the old central library, now the Cultural Center. Dude had no contract, the sheds had been a feature of Chicago streets by custom since the old newspaper wars between the Colonel’s Tribune, the Sun, the Times, and all the rest they buried. That beautification drive which included cow statues, and the unauthorized nighttime wrecking of Meigs Field’s runways probably was the younger Daleys managing to drop Chicago from the world-class category by forgetting who they were, what the city was. On behalf of the long-beautified Tribune and Sun-Times who made little complaint, and the old ghosts of the Colonel’s era who couldn’t, we at the New Vulgate break the spell and wish Maggie several uncomfortably warm years in Purgatory on her way to whatever Irish pols have turned Heaven into.

Daley leveraged last minute privatizations for all they were worth to get out of office without the door hitting his ass. Rahm Emanuel is going to have to pull a number of rabbits out of a hat he’s going to have to use as a pot to piss in. I left the city fifteen years ago largely because of the end of parking due to neighborhood permits, night baseball at Wrigley, and quick-timed parking meters. I took those unjust tickets as permission to carry in the car a small ballpeen hammer and plastic bags I could tape around suddenly broken meters. Being half-Italian I thought it best I get out of town before fantasy became reality became nightmare. Now it sounds like the city will go after cars again, as well as property owners, businesses, cabs, retail, tourists, conventions, etc., for another round in an effort to squirm out of right-sizing a city governance. The civic corruption is much cleaner now; in fact its simply baked into the “tight” budgets that since 1970 have risen while the city lost one million in population.

Like the newspaper shed owner, the family that owned McCuddy’s Tavern which sat across the street from old Comiskey Park got the shaft. They even had the full faith and promise of the state of Illinois:

“The tavern stood as a well-known companion to Comiskey Park for eight decades at 245 W. 35th St. When it was demolished in 1988 to make way for new Comiskey Park, the Senese family said the Illinois Sports Facility Authority and Gov. James Thompson promised that they’d be able to rebuild in three years, across from the new stadium, now U.S. Cellular Field…. But a judge ruled in 1991 that the Seneses did not secure an enforceable contract and that the authority did not have to honor the agreement.” (CT)

Perhaps the Daleys no longer drink.

The former capitol of working class America is now the largest tourist trap in America (Chicago Blues! Lollapalooza! Taste of Chicago! Theater! Cuisine!). The statistics were assembled by Thomas Hargrove in the Sun-Times, “The Lost Decade: Cook County.” The county had the second largest drop in manufacturing jobs in the first decade of the 21st century.

“Among the bigger-name casualties: a Motorola plant in Harvard in 2003; a Jays’ Potato chip plant on the South Side in 2007; a Brach’s Candy factory on the West Side in 2003; Replogle Globes announced it was closing its plant in Broadview 2010; Wrigley shuttered its South Ashland plant in 2006.” (CST)

The piece claims that “Illinois manufacturers still employ about 600,000 people and account for 13 percent of the state’s economic output…” slightly less than Michigan, though Illinois is up slightly and Michigan is plummeting. However, there is as of yet no reported farming on vacant stretches of reclaimed Chicago.

“A Tribune/WGN-TV investigation disclosed last month how a 2007 law allowed (Steven) Preckwinkle and fellow lobbyist David Piccioli to sub one day in a public school and line up their teacher pensions for life.” (CT)

Preckwinkle also got tuition waivers at ISU for two of his children and a nephew. It pays to be an insider, here the political director of the Illinois Federation of Teachers. These public service unions need a paint job bad. Even if they fend off cuts to their pensions and privileges this time there’s really no future in driving these states off a cliff. They only succeeded to date because WWII destroyed the rest of the world’s manufacturing capacity. Conditions have changed.

Whatever Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s playbook proves to be, there’s no question of Governor Pat Quinn’s reformer bona-fides, he’s like a less colorful Jerry Brown who never got bored with the dullest political questions regarding utilities rates. There’s only a question of his comprehension of the nature of the crisis. He only stepped up into office when former Gov. Rod Blagojevich managed to get caught being colorful. That scandal keeps giving too. Natasha Korecki in the Sun-Times has the story of Tony Rezko’s sentencing, “'Great Fall’ of Rezko”:

“‘Just looking at you physically is evidence of the great fall that you have had,’ U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve told Rezko. At that, the pallid Rezko flushed, his eyes welling up. But the one-time top fund-raiser to Rod Blagojevich and former friend of Barack Obama remained steady even as St. Eve handed down a 10 ½ year sentence for corruption, describing Rezko’s actions during the former governor’s tenure as ‘selfish and corrupt…. This sentence must send a message that enough is enough.’” (CST)

“His two stone-faced sons would sit quietly, their black eyes deep-set, young hawks angry and wounded. I could see their father in them. Watching the boys I thought about what Rezko must have been like years ago, at 19, coming out of Syria hungry and broke, with nothing but ambition. It didn’t take him long in Chicago to see how things were done, how crooked politics are here, played as politics are played in the Middle East and everywhere else. Everywhere, that is, but in those embarrassing Obama creation myths spun by myth masters from Chicago’s City Hall, all about hope and change and Barack transcending the broken politics of the past. Rezko was of the old broken politics, which is the same as the new, hopeful politics.” (CT)

Rezko appeared to hurry his own imprisonment and was never called during the Blago trial, apparently to help clear the air for his neighbor, the President of the United States, but its hard to imagine him receiving a pardon from on high.

I had thought Blagojevich’s attempted sale of Barack Obama’s Illinois Senate seat a notional crime to an immaculate customer. But apparently the Jackson family’s eagerness to commence raising the purchase money seemed to confirm the worst too loudly. I predict both Jesses will walk, though since they are giving off the whiff of cash the Congressional Ethics Committee may be hard pressed to turn down the offer by fining them.

The Tribune’s editorials have improved in these crisis years of late, though they are still written by Bruce Dold I think. They are also laid out in a more assertive way, though that is difficult to pull off given just how narrow a narrow-sheet the former broadsheet is today. (Come to think of it, I didn’t see the tabloid edition of the Trib during weekdays this time distributed through Starbucks, and they only intermittently had a stack of the RedEye edition on weekdays.) Here the Tribune hails progress in Illinois budgetary matters to its dubious readership, “Government success stories. In Illinois. Really.”

The sub-head: “With their 2012 budgets, Emanuel and Preckwinkle are forcing efficiencies and representing taxpayers. Imagine that.” (This Preckwinkle is Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, a well thought of black female reform pol who uncannily, is not a Stroger.)

The city, county and state are less dependent on the CBOT and Merc exchanges than New York city county and state are on Wall Street, but revenues are down and that ain’t good. David Roeder in his Sun-Times piece, “CME’s reputation gets a stress test,” recounts how the markets entered into new vulnerabilities in this decadent phase:

“The markets that make up CME Group created financial futures here in the 19th century as a service to agriculture, which needed certainty and a centralized information source for prices…. The Merc was the first exchange to ‘go public’ and issue stock in itself so it could better compete as technology was remaking the business. It absorbed the Chicago Board of Trade a few years later. Traders who used to own the joints sold out for their benefit, or kept shares and watched them rise more until the financial crisis undercut stocks. But they were no longer in charge. Shareholders and heavy users of the markets, the big investment banks, were in control” (CST)

Commodities keep the Chicago exchanges grounded compared to how their tools were adapted to other purely financial uses in the New York and London markets. Still the Mayor and Governor are looking at those revenues and the cost of doing business will go up.

In lighter news while I was reading the Chicago papers, Scott Tyler was remembered for his Flag stunt back in the 1980s at the School of the Art Institute. He wasn't in Repulse Kava but “Dread Scott” was a classmate of Bill and John's at SAIC and when he lost interest in music donated his equipment which the new guy, Craig White, also a black kid but much poorer, got to use. Don’t know what Craig is doing now but he was a favorite guitarist.

“Two nights later at the Water Hole, a long-running bar on the West Side, the band out-numbered the audience. Septuagenarian blues belter Mary Lane sang for all she was worth, but not more than 15 people, if that, wandered into the place all evening. ‘It’s been steady going downhill,’ Lane said after. ‘I always had a crowd. I ain’t never had no six or seven people.’”

In the Sun-Times novelist Harry Mark Petrakis remembered an old job, “Laboring in the shadows of the ice men”, though I couldn’t find a link to it:

“For the following year, four nights a week, I became familiar with a network of transcontinental transport. Day and night, long trains of freight cars moved east from the Pacific Coast and north from Florida carrying vegetables, oranges, grapefruit and peaches. From the heartland of the country, trains carried bacon, ham and sausage processed at huge packing plants. All this transport required icing to keep down spoilage. For decades, ice cars called ‘reefers’ provided that cooling. Bunkers holding the ice were built into each end of the reefer. Salt was added to hasten the ice melting and lower the car’s temperature. A reefer required as much as 10,000 pounds of ice to fill its bunkers, while a transcontinental trip required that a train make half a dozen stops in railroad yards of different cities to be re-iced.”

“One can appreciate why the ‘we are the 99%’ militants might resist Mr. Siegel's logic. He links the liberalism of the 1960s, not any excess of the free market, to today's crisis. The Great Society put the state on growth hormones. Less widely appreciated, the era gave birth to a powerful new political force, the public-sector union. For the first time in American history there was an interest dedicated wholly to lobbying for a larger government and the taxes and debt to pay for it. A former editor of the left-leaning Dissent magazine, Mr. Siegel has written several well-received books on New York, including the 1997 ‘The Future Once Happened Here.’ He calls his hometown ‘the model for cross subsidies’ in America. ‘Wall Street makes money off the bonds that have to be floated to pay the public sector workers in New York.’ Thanks to union clout, he notes, salaries and benefits for teachers, bus drivers and city secretaries have outgained the private sector during this sluggish economy.”

“In the heated debates over government collective bargaining, a simple fact is often lost: Benefits for teachers and municipal workers are often more expensive than they are for state employees, let alone for workers in private business. The disparity between runaway local costs and more restrained state benefits is the key rationale -- often misunderstood -- for the efforts of Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Ohio and other states to limit local collective bargaining over benefits.”

“The Ocean State has been running a $7 billion unfunded pension liability, one of the largest per capita in the nation, and its annual pension bill was expected to double next year to $600 million. While public unions wanted to keep partying like it's 1995 -- when its pension liability was $1 billion -- the state's left-leaning independent Governor Lincoln Chafee and Democratic treasurer Gina Raimondo took a more sober view.”

“After a perfunctory discussion of the market turmoil, the fund manager says, the discussion turned to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Paulson said he had erred by not punishing Bear Stearns shareholders more severely. The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into ‘conservatorship’ -- a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets. Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out. So too would the various classes of preferred stock, he said. The fund manager says he was shocked that Paulson would furnish such specific information -- to his mind, leaving little doubt that the Treasury Department would carry out the plan. The managers attending the meeting were thus given a choice opportunity to trade on that information.”

“The Bloomberg Markets scoop about Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's meeting with money managers at which he disclosed to them his plans to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he was telling the public something else is attracting a bit of attention elsewhere. Ben Smith has a post at Politico pointing out that a lot of those at the meeting are Democratic political donors. And Jesse Eisinger has a post at ProPublica calling for a congressional inquiry to get to the bottom of whether any of those at the meeting made money by shorting Fannie or Freddie after the tip from Secretary Paulson. But the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and CNBC have held back from the full-scale pile-on or swarm that you sometimes see on a big or not-so-big story like, say, Governor Perry's memory lapse. Maybe it's because Henry Paulson is out of office. Or maybe the other news organizations don't want to give Bloomberg Markets credit for the scoop that Bloomberg Markets developed out of envy or out of a desire not to call attention to the fact that they didn't develop the news on their own.”

“The dominance of the European aristocracy provided the old European left with convenient villains, people whose great wealth and power were guaranteed by birth and who seemed to do little to justify their luxuries. By contrast, Carnegie and Jobs earned their billions with ingenuity and effort. The recent biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson reminds us that he was no saint, but he certainly provided plenty of joy in return for his billions. Every American playing ‘Angry Birds’ on an iPhone or downloading Lady Gaga on an iPod or watching Pixar’s ‘Toy Story 3’ on an iPad owes something to Jobs. To most of us, he’s far more hero than villain. My Harvard colleague Elizabeth Warren, who is running for a Massachusetts Senate seat, recently reminded us that ‘there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.’ I espoused similar ideas in my book ‘Triumph of the City,’ when I discussed the magic that occurs when people learn from one another in urban clusters. Jobs’ own success was built on collaboration with Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula and John Lasseter. But the collaborative nature of creativity only makes innovation more delicate and unpredictable and more likely to be damaged by an overly aggressive federal government.”

“Worse than Mr. Brands's sin of omission, however, is this sin of commission: His assertions that there is something new under the monetary sun. Actually, with the exception of the automatic-teller machine, we've seen it all before. Inflation is as old as the first coin clipped for a bit of valuable metal, and the first bad loan no doubt followed hard on the founding of the first bank. The author writes that Lincoln, by detaching the dollar from its golden anchor, ‘made possible innovations in finance unimagined by previous generations.’ But John Law, the 18th-century Scottish economist who served as finance minister for Louis XV in France, not only imagined this particular innovation but also implemented it for the king -- with disastrously inflationary results. ‘Stubborn tradition’ is Mr. Brands's explanation for the persistence of mankind's adherence to currencies backed by something other than the good intentions of the governments that print them. If so, humanity is stubborn for cause. The invariable rule on paper currencies, as the author does not quite right come out and say, is that they lose their value. Will the dollar prove an exception? The rising price of gold suggests that many doubt it.”

“The game the Times and its reporter, David Kocieniewski, are up to is clear at the start of the article, with this false dichotomy: “A handful of billionaires like Warren E. Buffett and Bill Gates have joined Democrats in calling for an elimination of the breaks, saying that the current system adds to the budget deficit, contributes to the widening income gap between the richest and the rest of society, and shifts the tax burden onto small businesses and the middle class. Republicans have resisted, saying the tax increases on the wealthy would harm the economy and cost jobs. This is just flat out-false, in at least third ways. First, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have not called for eliminating the charitable tax break. In fact, they are using the tax break to avoid paying taxes on tens of billions of dollars more than Ronald Lauder has through his charitable activities, which, while vast, are themselves dwarfed by the assets of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, funded by Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett. Second, if anyone has been calling for the elimination or reduction of special tax breaks in favor of a flatter, simpler system, it’s not been Democrats, but Republicans like Rick Perry, Steve Forbes, and Herman Cain. And third, eliminating the special breaks doesn’t necessary require ‘tax increases on the wealthy’ — one could have revenue-neutral tax reform that lowers rates for everyone while broadening the base.”

“The U.S. was a net exporter of petroleum products in six of the first nine months this year, and the trend accelerated in the third quarter, with September data released Tuesday showing net exports of 919,000 barrels per day, more than any month this year. That indicates to observers that this year will be the U.S.’s first as a net exporter since 1949, when the U.S. economy was ramping up rapidly after World War II.”

“Long-term ideas of ‘destiny’ are not easily assimilated to shorter-term glooms about the loss of American power and prestige. It’s a strange fact, but in the present political season it is the American right that seems to harbor the most skepticism about American power. I personally find this odd: Yet again the United States has managed to get itself largely on the right side of a massive historical shift — the Arab Spring. And yet, most of the remarks made by seekers of the Republican nomination have been sour or grudging.

I remember Bernard-Henri Levy saying, in the early stages of the Iraq war that he opposed, that America had been essentially in the right about combating fascism and Nazism, and essentially right about opposing and outlasting the various forms of Communism, and that all else was pretty much commentary. Something of the sort seems to apply in the present case, both in recent developments in Burma and Vietnam as well as in Libya and Syria. The crowds have a tendency to be glad that there is an American superpower, if only to balance the cynical powers of Moscow and Beijing. Perhaps if it were not for President Obama being in the White House, our right wing would be quicker to see and appreciate this point.”

“Ross Perot, who won nearly one in five votes in 1992 to become the most successful independent candidate in modern presidential politics, ran at a moment when 39% of Americans said they were dissatisfied with how the nation was being governed. Today, Gallup reports, 81% say they are dissatisfied. Pollsters and politicians of both parties say those and slate of similar findings show that voters have become unusually open to an independent presidential run next year.”

“But realism does not mean that politicians should be concerned only with military and economic might. In fact, morality can play a key role in shaping international competition between political powers — and separating the winners from the losers. I came to this conclusion from studying ancient Chinese political theorists like Guanzi, Confucius, Xunzi and Mencius. They were writing in the pre-Qin period, before China was unified as an empire more than 2,000 years ago — a world in which small countries were competing ruthlessly for territorial advantage. It was perhaps the greatest period for Chinese thought, and several schools competed for ideological supremacy and political influence. They converged on one crucial insight: The key to international influence was political power, and the central attribute of political power was morally informed leadership. Rulers who acted in accordance with moral norms whenever possible tended to win the race for leadership over the long term.”

“China can’t afford to be smug about the euro zone’s woes. Although the nation’s total debt comes to no more than 44 percent of GDP, China has some overextended regions of its own - Little Greeces. Hainan province, for example, has amassed debt close to 100 percent GDP. The new policy of allowing local governments to issue their own bonds may make the problem worse. High debt levels threaten to choke a fifth of Chinese cities, as a quarter of the $1.7 trillion local government debt matures in 2011. According to the National Audit Office, as many as 78 Chinese cities have debt to GDP ratios of more than 100 percent.”

“Apart from the country’s two main stock exchanges, three commodities exchanges and one financial futures exchange, no other entity is allowed to list new shares, offer centralized pricing or make markets, and no more than 200 investors may hold stakes in a single traded asset, the notice said…. Although there is no official estimate for the number of unregulated exchanges or the volume of trading conducted through them, Chinese analysts say there are well over 300, up from a handful five years ago.”

“Asked if he is concerned the EU is going soft on values for the sake of strategic relations, Sangay said EU politicians should not believe the narrative that China is becoming an economic superpower. He pointed to studies which say the Indian model of organic growth, next to China's model of foreign capital and state-run firms, will see India move ahead of China in the coming years: ‘As long as a process is democratic and based on rule of law, rather than top-down, there is more chance of its being fair and sustainable. Because of censorship, we do not see the damage [the Chinese government] is doing. We don't understand the ramifications of the economic and political decisions made by the leadership.’ Lack of proper oversight on dams built on rivers such as the Brahmaputra and the Mekong could cause environmental chaos in future, he warned. Political persecution and mass-scale mineral exploitation in Tibet is also causing ‘a scar on the psyche of the people’ that could end in upheaval, he added: ‘I am not predicting anything, but the Arab Spring also came out of nowhere.’ He noted that Chinese statisticians have been caught lying on GDP growth: ‘The Chinese economy might seem to be booming. But what is really happening on the ground is difficult to asses ... Reports say they are spending $1.4 trillion on an internal stimulus package. But at the same time, China is also spending more on internal security than on external security.’”

“In retrospect, splitting British India into East and West Pakistan and India may have been one of the 20th century’s greatest geostrategic errors. I got a hint of this in the 1970s when I was injured at Ft. Benning, Georgia, and befriended by two Pakistani officers attending an advanced military course. My leg-length cast made walking to the mess hall a pain, so the Pakistani major and lieutenant-colonel took turns chauffeuring me in their car. One evening, in slow traffic, the major and I passed an Indian Army colonel standing on the sidewalk. The major cracked his window, yelled, and waved. The Indian colonel smiled, raised his left hand, and wiggled his fingers. The major glanced at me and with a soft chuckle said, ‘That man -- he is my enemy.’ Despite their recent war, I knew better. On at least two occasions the Indian colonel had dropped by our bachelor officers’ quarters to watch television with the Pakistanis.”

“At sunset, on the eve of Monday’s vote, a group of local farmers sat sucking on a water pipe on the roadside near Tomiya. Asked what they thought of their local candidates, they named the Muslim Brotherhood candidates and, like everyone here, candidate Yussuf Abu Talab, whose father and grandfather have represented the district in parliament for as long as anyone can remember. ‘Abu Talab’s father was very powerful, anything you needed, he would give you,’ said one of the farmers, Taha Abu Shaaban. ‘He was in the ruling party, but the people loved him.’ As for the young upstarts in Tahrir, Mr. Abu Shaaban said there was one guy from the Revolutionary Youth Coalition running in the area. ‘But I can’t remember his name,’ he said. ‘There are so many new candidates and parties here.’”

“Young Egyptians at the leading edge of the January revolution watched for 10 months as grey-haired politicians and generals wrangled fruitlessly over the country’s future. Now they have returned to Cairo’s Tahrir Square in full force against both the armed forces that have stifled change and the political elite -- including opposition parties -- that appeared all too willing to collaborate with them.”

“The number of bombings and attacks has fallen sharply from the peak in 2006-2007, but Iraq still seethes with barely contained sectarian tensions and intermittent bouts of violence. That is not deterring investment bankers hungry for potentially lucrative mandates. Over the past year a trickle of visits from intrepid bankers has turned into a steady stream of senior executives from some of the world’s largest financial institutions.”

“The sound was both familiar -- Amazigh music uses half tones, like European classical music, rather than Arab music’s quarter tones -- and hard to pin down. There are suggestions of Spanish and Cuban music, which makes sense given Libya’s proximity to the former Muslim kingdoms of Al Andalus and to Niger, Mali, Sudan, and other points of origin for Afro-American music. The bundeer, of course, is African. And while this music sounds as though it were the fruit of a long tradition, it is not. The guitar arrived in Zuwarah only in the 1970s, as part of a North African Amazigh cultural awakening -- ‘Berber’ is the term outsiders use -- and all of Zuwarah’s young players are self-taught. While Amazigh have always sung at weddings, the first modern song written in the Tamazight language dates only to 1975, when “My City” was sung. When he heard ‘My City,’ the poet Mahrouq wrote ‘Amousnaw’ and gave it to his disciple Naggiar to sing. Neither song was recorded at the time.”

“The Shabab have been terrorizing Somalia for years, imposing a harsh and alien form of Islam, chopping off heads and unleashing suicide bombers, including Somali-Americans recruited from Minnesota. But the African Union has dealt the Shabab a crippling blow in Mogadishu, which is what may have encouraged Kenyan and Ethiopian forces to recently invade separate parts of Somalia in an unusual regional effort to spread the Shabab thin on several fronts and methodically eliminate them. But the Shabab are hardly giving up. Young, messianic insurgents are viciously resisting the African Union troops, sometimes fighting hand to hand, with both sides suffering heavy losses. African Union officials, who have been reluctant to disclose casualties and in the past even provided apparently false accounting of the numbers, revealed that more than 500 soldiers had been killed in Somalia, making this peacekeeping mission one of the bloodiest of recent times.”

“Europe's crisis has created a world of common-market skeptics. Except in Africa.Although the euro zone is convulsing from debt contagion brought on by the profligacy of its weakest members, several regional trading blocs in Africa are pushing for closer integration among countries big and small. For decades, African technocrats have admired Europe's common market, where open borders and the right to work in any member country are seen as the kind of steps that would boost trade in Africa as well. Those steps are also seen as lowering barriers that now deter investors, allowing smaller African states to thrive.”

“‘I am being prosecuted for not cooking the books,’ Mr Georgiou told the Financial Times. ‘We would like to be a good, boring institution doing its job. Unfortunately, in Greece statistics is a combat sport.’ The accusations against him come as eurozone finance ministers prepare to decide on Tuesday whether to release a delayed 8bn ($10.6bn) loan tranche to Athens, needed to pay public sector salaries and pension next month. Mr Georgiou is due to appear before Greece’s prosecutor for financial crime on December 12. If convicted of ‘betraying the country’s interests’, he could face life imprisonment.”

“Could two museums be more different? Both were unveiled during the last decade (the Quai Branly in 2006, the Patrimoine in 2007). Both evolved out of older collections and defunct institutions. But one displays authentic artifacts, the other reproductions; one focuses on non-Western cultures, the other on a quintessentially Western culture. One takes whole objects out of context, essentially turning them into fragments, while the other takes fragments out of context, essentially treating them as whole objects. But both are also responses to issues that have been transforming museums in recent decades. And those challenges can seem more evident here in Paris, where so many museums are still staging places for the shaping of civilization. The European Enlightenment, born here, enshrined Reason as its deity. Museums became its temples.”

“The Prussian reforms of 1808 to 1812 granted all citizens freedom of trade, and put an end to serfdom and what until then had been utterly unchecked arbitrariness towards the Jews. The Jews were still only allowed to become public servants in exceptional cases and certainly never officers in the military, but unlike the Christian majority, they made the most of the new opportunities. They emancipated themselves and at high speed. Germany, with its half-hearted reformism, sluggish economic development (until 1870), and strong legal security provided a fertile ground. To top it all, Germany had some of the best Gymnasiums and universities in Europe, as well as some of the worst primary education. Unlike the majority of their Christian and still largely illiterate peers, Jewish boys as a rule had always been taught to read and write Hebrew. Their parents did not put silver spoons in their cradles, but all manner of educational nourishment. Jewish parents knew exactly how much cultural skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic would improve their children's chances, whereas Christian parents and clerics were still claiming, right up into the 20th century, that ‘reading is bad for the eyes!’”

“Amidst all the turmoil going on in the world today, the editors chose to publish a column entitled ‘Israel and Pinkwashing.’ In the first paragraph, the author, Sarah Schulman, sets forth her premise: ‘After generations of sacrifice and organization, gay people in parts of the world have won protection from discrimination and relationship recognition. But these changes have given rise to a nefarious phenomenon: the co-opting of white gay people by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim political forces in Western Europe and Israel.’ Schulman quickly loses sight of Western Europe, however, as do the Times' headline writers, and zeroes in on her real target – Israel. She accuses Israel of ‘pinkwashing,’ which she defines as ‘a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians' human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.’ In other words, if Israel takes pride in being a country where gays don't have to live in hiding or terror, it's actually nothing more, we're told, than an elaborate ruse to distract attention from the country's true nature.”

“The chaos of Metternich’s era prompted Switzerland’s transformation in 1848 into a federal state that, notwithstanding various blunders and blemishes, has proved a model of freedom, affluence and social stability up to the present day. No wonder other European Union citizens look enviously at Switzerland. Could a Swiss-type solution be the answer to the eurozone’s troubles?”

“‘All those noisy and incoherent promises, the impossible demands, the hotchpotch of unfounded ideas and impractical plans.’ It is hardly surprising that Antonio Salazar, the ruthless dictator of Portugal, had such thoughts when talking about democratic politics. Yet, his appraisal has now become wide-spread among disenchanted voters. Two decades after Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of history, it is now common to talk about the end of politics.”

“But technocracy is not to be limited to the allegedly wayward southern pair of states. It is such a grand wheeze, believe the project's deep thinkers, that under proposals for deeper economic integration unveiled by the European Commission last week, the unelected EU executive and the ECB are now to dictate national budgets of all eurozone states.

Firstly, let us be clear about what has not happened. Goldman Sachs has not been made king of Europe, as some recent articles in the French press have hinted at, given the association of Mario Monti, Lucas Papademos and the new head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, with the organisation that American journalist and professional muck-raker Matt Taibbi described as a ‘great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.’ The reality is far worse than a cabal of undead 'banksters' imposing their will. It is systemic and not a conspiracy by a coterie of Trilateral Commission members, Bilderberg Group attendees or Goldman Sachs staff.”

“‘Zur Verfassung Europas’ (‘On Europe's Constitution’) is the name of his new book, which is basically a long essay in which he describes how the essence of our democracy has changed under the pressure of the crisis and the frenzy of the markets. Habermas says that power has slipped from the hands of the people and shifted to bodies of questionable democratic legitimacy, such as the European Council. Basically, he suggests, the technocrats have long since staged a quiet coup d'état. ‘On July 22, 2011, (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel and (French President) Nicolas Sarkozy agreed to a vague compromise -- which is certainly open to interpretation -- between German economic liberalism and French etatism,’ he writes. ‘All signs indicate that they would both like to transform the executive federalism enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty into an intergovernmental supremacy of the European Council that runs contrary to the spirit of the agreement.’ Habermas refers to the system that Merkel and Sarkozy have established during the crisis as a ‘post-democracy.’”

“The lesson of the 1930s is that a global depression weakens democracies, leads to the rise of radical new political forces -- and, in the process, raises the risk of international conflict. A modern version of the 1930s would see a new generation of nationalist politicians rise to power in Europe, against a background of economic chaos and the break-up of the EU. Tensions would also rise outside Europe, as the global economic situation worsened. The balance of power in Asia would shift even faster, with a rising China facing a weakened America.”

“If Kessler was at the center of everything, the center itself -- owing in part to his own efforts -- was disappearing in his lifetime. He was witness to an astounding process of demolition, the collapse of empire and of centuries-old authority, intellectual and artistic as much as political, social and economic. The process had clearly begun in the decades leading up to World War I but then accelerated at a blinding pace in the war years and after. W.B. Yeats said as much -- ‘things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’ -- in his famous poetic assessment of 1919, ‘The Second Coming.’ Kessler was in the eye of the storm, actually wallowing in the adventure, but he was always more a witness, or facilitator, than a primary actor. Born in 1868, the eldest child of the Paris-based German banker Adolf Wilhelm Kessler and the Irish baroness Alice Harriet Blosse-Lynch, he was a cosmopolitan from the outset. Schooled in Paris, Ascot and Hamburg, with subsequent military service in a socially prestigious Prussian cavalry regiment and surrounded by wealth and privilege, he would nevertheless exemplify a revolutionary turmoil that was the antithesis of his family and social milieu. His sexuality, which Mr. Easton rightly emphasizes in his excellent introduction, may have motivated this revolt. Kessler was decidedly homosexual and reveled in his own sensuality. The senses, he insisted, were the only source of true beauty. ‘Is it possible that our culture can find its way... to a standpoint from which it can say yes, with a good conscience, to lust, to the naked, to all of life, as did the Greeks?’ he asked in May 1908. ‘This,’ he then asserted, ‘is the fundamental problem of our culture.’ An emphatic presentism, a celebration of life and experience as opposed to history and morality, guided him in all his pursuits.”

“All the emails have shown is that scientists are no less prone to vanity, rivalries and corner-cutting than people in other walks of life. But that is everything. Voters in a democracy do not argue about science. They argue about the authority of scientists. And scientists’ claim to authority comes from the perception that, in fact, they do not let their vanities and rivalries influence their work. Where others pursue their grubby little self-interest, scientists pursue only the truth…. Defending a scientist’s furtiveness on the grounds that ‘his science is good’ is like defending a politician’s blunder on the grounds that he ‘did nothing illegal’. The emails were damaging because they undermined the scientists’ claim to be speaking as scientists rather than as interested parties.”

“the story of spielgusher begins at what would be near the end of the minutemen. me and d. boon were huge richard meltzer students. we knew of him from his helping to create rock-write. in most places where we read him, it was the only thing we found interesting. it was also gut busting and for corndogs like us, that meant brain busting - or was it the other way around? we dug the confusion. we knew of him from his ‘hepcats from hell’ radio show on kpfk, they were on after midnight on saturdays. they were the best, they were a trip. literally for us - I'd be on the deck w/lights out and just listening/ tripping/ pondering/ voyaging. of course we knew of him from writing lyrics for the blue oyster cult, of course! ‘scientist rock’ is what he called the minutemen in creem magazine for a review of the ‘bean-spill’ e.p.”

“Evans’ three years touring and recording with AC/DC account for the lion’s share of the material, and fans won’t be disappointed. Beginning with his audition for the band through his unceremonious dismissal in London in 1977, Evans issues a page-turning, unsparing look at the personalities and attitudes that dominated that group. Brothers Malcolm and Angus Young, who founded AC/DC in 1973, are seen as the band’s creative, financial and strategic shot-callers, dictating virtually all aspects of the group’s operations and soliciting minimal input from the other three members. While their passion for making music and for achieving commercial success is white hot, their interpersonal skills evoke images of towering glaciers. Evans describes frontman Bon Scott as savvy enough to stay close to the brothers and tow the company line, but whenever circumstances allowed, Bon was out the door, eager to enjoy the trappings of the rock and roll lifestyle away from the Youngs’ sharp, puritanical assessments.”

“More than 30 years ago, in Washington, D.C., I secured a copy of a single by a Los Angeles band called The Bags. The two-song 7-inch, released on Dangerhouse, had a girl on the cover who looked right at you with huge eyes. The songs, ‘Survive’ and ‘Babylonian Gorgon,’ were great and made many of my mix tapes. A few weeks ago, the girl on the cover of the single sent me her new autobiography, released on Feral House Press. It's called Violence Girl, and the author is Alice Bag. I read it from cover to cover. If you are a fan of the classic, early punk music that was happening in the late 1970s here in Los Angeles, this is a well-written and informed read from someone who was there from the beginning. Alice wasn't one of those who turned up late to the game and benefited from the hard work and innovation of the L.A. punk bands and musicians who came before her. Rather, she was in one of the bands that got the whole thing started.”

PP: Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely. What happened was when James hooked up with Anya Phillips, who was a good friend of mine - I loved Anya but um, she was his manager. She became the manager of the band, and she had visions of James being this big star, and thinking that he should be separate from the band, that it was really James' thing. She kind of planted that, and the truth is James was writing most of the music, but Jody was an amazing guitar player and really, the sound of the music was created by the individuals as musicians so it was, in that respect, a band. But she kind of separated the band, and that's why when we were recording she wanted to pay the band just session fees, and it started this divide. That's when George Scott quit the band, and then they brought in Dave Hofstra, who's also an amazing player, but to re-do George's parts on some of the record... It got really messy, and in Paris it all blew up, and I was kind of the go-between between the band, and James and Anya. So they'd say ‘tell the boys this,’ you know? So (a resignation laugh) what happened, basically, is they took the money from the Paris gig and - should I say this?- they bought drugs and so the band was really pissed. So we had to decide and Anya said ‘stay with us,’ and I kinda just said, ‘Ah, you know, I'm gonna quit with the boys.’”

***

“Scarcity Of Tanks is a music group that began in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A. during the summer of 2004 by Matthew Wascovich. They played their first show on 28 December 2004 in Cleveland. SOT has released five full-length albums from Total Life Society Records and have toured throughout the United States. Their latest albums are "Vulgar Defender" and "Fear Is Not Conscience." These albums, released on 22 January 2012, feature Nick Lesley on guitar, Kid Millions on drums, John "Broken Hand"(r) Morton on guitar/theremin, Jim Sauter on saxophone, Weasel Walter on bass, and Matthew "Muug Shank" Wascovich on vocals. Familiar names? Yes, these guys play(ed) in Necking, Oneida, the electric eels, Borbetomagus, Impractical Cockpit and The Flying Luttenbachers, so these are albums worth checking out."

“I’ve been working on what may become my all-time favorite Chronicle photo morgue archive gallery, a tribute to TV news anchors of Bay Area past. I was reminiscing on YouTube and beyond the other day, and ran across this epic 1970s promo for KGO, which featured Van ‘The Kid’ Amburg and the news cowboys. The San Francisco Peninsula Press Club has more information about the video here. KGO was pioneering in a more conversational/ sensational news delivery style in the 1970s, which was controversial at the time.”

“Like the NBA, revenue sharing should be a topic. Players are entitled to 56 percent-57 percent of league revenues in any year in which revenues exceed $2.7 billion. The NHL topped that mark last season and is expected to this year. Long-term, front-loaded contracts also figure to get attention. They had become common practice under the current CBA, which had to be amended after Ilya Kovalchuk’s contract debacle with the New Jersey Devils. Still, many believe the negotiations won’t be as volatile as they were in 2004, when the players finally agreed to a hard salary cap.”

At 33, he found himself at the vortex of simmering ethnic rivalries among Nigeria’s Hausas in the north, Yorubas in the southwest and Ibos in the southeast. The largely Christian Ibos were envied as one of Africa’s best-educated and most industrious peoples, possessed of much of Nigeria’s oil wealth. Tensions finally exploded into assassinations, coups and a massacre of 30,000 Ibos by Hausas and federal troops. While he denounced the massacre and cited other Ibo grievances, Colonel Ojukwu for months resisted rising Ibo pressure for secession. He proposed a weak federation to separate Nigeria’s three tribal regions politically. But Col. Yakubu Gowon, leader of the military government in Lagos, rejected the idea. A clash over federal taxation of the Ibo region’s oil and coal industries precipitated the final break. ‘Long live the Republic of Biafra,’ Colonel Ojukwu proclaimed on May 30, 1967. Five weeks later, civil war began when Nigerian military forces invaded the breakaway province. It was a lopsided war, with other nations supporting federal forces seeking to unify the country and Biafra standing virtually alone. Nigeria was Africa’s most populous nation, with 57 million people, of which 8 million to 10 million were Ibos.”

***

Thanks to Steve Beeho, Jay Babcock, Jan Roehlk, Joe Pope, Dave Naz.

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• The New Vulgate• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Vann Gray, David Lightbourne• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

“Emanuel’s $6.3 billion 2012 budget — and the $220 million in taxes, fines and fees needed to pay for it — scored a 50-to-0 vote in the City Council on Wednesday.

That’s a triumph for a rookie mayor — even one who honed his lobbying skills on Capital Hill — and a tribute to the partnership he forged with aldermen by tweaking his budget to accommodate their concerns. Moments after the final vote, Emanuel warned aldermen from the rostrum that it was only ‘the beginning’ and that ‘hard decisions’ await. Police and fire contracts expire June 30.”

“One by one, Chicago aldermen stood Wednesday and decried the past, bemoaned the tough decision they were faced with making, complimented Mayor Rahm Emanuel for treating them fairly and then promised to approve his budget. It was the part about decrying the past that I had the most trouble swallowing, as I could swear that many of those who spoke about the bogus budgetary of the last decade -- never mentioning Mayor Daley by name mind you -- were the same ones who stood and praised the wisdom of Daley’s robbing Peter to pay Paul methods.”

“On the Southeast Side, in the rust belt of old steel mills where Vrdolyak grew up and stayed, some still see him as a Robin Hood. People whose kids got jobs because Eddie made a call. Or whose mother’s medical bills were paid out of his own pocket. Unlike Robin Hood, however, Vrdolyak helped the poor but got very rich. Amazingly, he’s one of the lawyers being paid from the multibillion-dollar tobacco settlement. And so even in prison, he was collecting tens of thousands of dollars each month — and he’ll keep collecting for years to come. Imagine. Stuart Levine, who ratted him out, is today destitute and selling synthetic cigarettes in a suburban mall at the same time Ed Vrdolyak will walk out of federal prison possibly richer than when he went in.”

“By 1857, less than two years after Pinkerton launched his ‘detective police business,’ the Tribune called on the city to fire the police chief and appoint Pinkerton in his place to stem a recent rash of burglaries and robberies. Pinkerton's reputation soon spread across the nation. In 1860, Pinkerton was hired by a Baltimore railroad company to protect its lines against Southern secessionists. In February 1861, a Pinkerton man uncovered a plot to kill President-elect Abraham Lincoln, who was making a multicity tour on his way east for the inauguration. Pinkerton thwarted the plot by smuggling Lincoln through to Washington. Soon Pinkerton — and his men — were everywhere. Nearly every major crime story or figure in the late 1800s is linked in some way to Pinkerton's men, including the hunts for Jesse James and Butch Cassidy, and the investigations of numerous bank heists, train robberies, sensational kidnappings and gruesome grave robberies. Pinkerton also wrote more than 15 detective stories based on his experiences that became best-sellers. Pinkerton revolutionized law enforcement. In an era when city policemen rarely caught any criminals, he and his men tracked down fugitives and brought thugs to justice. He taught his detectives surveillance and undercover techniques. Pinkerton was one of the first to compile mug shots of known criminals and suspects, a practice later adopted by the FBI. His efforts protecting Lincoln and spying during the Civil War was the forerunner of the U.S. Secret Service. His agency slogan, ‘We Never Sleep,’ and its image of an unblinking eye, is believed to be the source of ‘private eye.’”

“Changing the river's flow sent untreated waste down the Des Plaines, Illinois and Mississippi rivers, past farms, small towns and big cities like St. Louis. ‘What right has Chicago to pour its filth down into what was before a sweet and clean river, pollute its waters, and materially reduce the value of property on both sides of the river … and bring sickness and death to the citizens?’ a resident of Morris, Ill., asked after the reversal was completed in 1900.By digging a 28-mile canal between the Chicago and Des Plaines rivers, engineers broke down the natural barrier between the watersheds of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Yet they left an unintended legacy that haunts us today: The canal created a kind of highway that allowed invasive species like the Asian carp to swim up the Mississippi and, it is feared, into the Great Lakes.”

“So, for decades, clients have essentially underwritten the training of new lawyers, paying as much as $300 an hour for the time of associates learning on the job. But the downturn in the economy, and long-running efforts to rethink legal fees, have prompted more and more of those clients to send a simple message to law firms: Teach new hires on your own dime. ‘The fundamental issue is that law schools are producing people who are not capable of being counselors,’ says Jeffrey W. Carr, the general counsel of FMC Technologies, a Houston company that makes oil drilling equipment. ‘They are lawyers in the sense that they have law degrees, but they aren’t ready to be a provider of services.’ Last year, a survey by American Lawyer found that 47 percent of law firms had a client say, in effect, ‘We don’t want to see the names of first- or second-year associates on our bills.’ Other clients are demanding that law firms charge flat fees. This has helped to hasten a historic decline in hiring. The legal services market has shrunk for three consecutive years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Altogether, the top 250 firms — which hired 27 percent of graduates from the top 50 law schools last year — have lost nearly 10,000 jobs since 2008, according to an April survey by The National Law Journal.”

“Looked at from the vantage point of the original Constitution, ObamaCare should be dead on arrival. But the New Deal transformation of long-established Commerce Clause jurisprudence has introduced a set of unprincipled (but fine-grained) distinctions that turn the law into a mass of linguistic absurdities that should lead ordinary people to question the collective sanity of the legal profession. From the straightforward prose of the Commerce Clause, Judge Silberman concludes (accurately) that ‘[t]oday, the only recognized limitations are that (1) Congress may not regulate non-economic behavior based solely on an attenuated link to interstate commerce, and (2) Congress may not regulate intrastate economic behavior if its aggregate impact on interstate commerce is negligible.’ From this dubious premise (which has no mooring in either the text or history of the Commerce Clause), Judge Silberman’s closing salvo in Seven-Sky then waxes eloquently on ‘the imperative that Congress be free to forge national solutions to national problems, no matter how local -- or seemingly passive -- their individual origins.’ In one well-crafted sentence, he has managed to encapsulate everything that is wrong with our modern Commerce Clause jurisprudence.”

“No subject sits more centrally in the American political debate than the economic plight of the middle class. Presumably that means people making between $50,000 and $175,000 a year. The president fashions himself their champion. This surely is bunk. Mr. Obama is the champion of the public-sector middle class. Just as private business has become an abstraction to the new class of public-sector Democratic politicians and academics who populate the Obama administration, so too the blue-collar workers employed by them have become similarly abstracted. You would think someone in the private labor movement would wake up and smell the tar sands. Last week's Big Labor ‘victory’ in Ohio was about spending tens of millions to support state and local government workers. Many union families attached to the state's withering auto plants no doubt voted with their public-sector brothers in solidarity. But why? Where the rubber hits the road -- new jobs that will last a generation -- what does this public-sector vote do for them?”

“Shale gas has undoubtedly been a game-changer in the United States. Over recent decades, the rapid uptake of new innovations such as hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling has transformed the country from a gas importer to exporter. For years an accompanying debate has been raging in the US concerning the merits and demerits of shale gas. Across the Atlantic, the European Union has been behind the curve. Only recently has talk of shale gas finally reached the ears of the European Parliament. The EP hosted a number of hearings on this issue in October and its industry (ITRE) and environment (ENVI) committees have now decided to draft separate own-initiative reports on shale gas. Regrettably, this development mirrors the current discussions on this new energy source only too closely. Public debate on shale gas has become polarised.”

“Trivers’ Deceit and Self-Deception is the most original and important of these works. In it, he attempts to construct a grand theory of deception, arguing that we continually paint a distorted picture of the world so that we might more easily get our way with others. So we inflate our achievements, play down our failings and rationalise away our mistakes.”

“David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, restates this idea in his book ‘The Social Animal,’ while Geoff Colvin, in his book ‘Talent Is Overrated,’ adds that ‘I.Q. is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, I.Q. predicts little or nothing about performance.’ But this isn’t quite the story that science tells. Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point. Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a ‘thinly disguised’ intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were ‘only’ in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work.”

“Crankishness aside, technocracy and autocracy have long been natural bedfellows. When political power is not publicly contested at all, electability is irrelevant and expertise can give the ambitious an edge. In China all but one of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee are engineers. This marks a shift: many of Mao’s revolutionary generation had no higher education at all. And it may be temporary. Li Keqiang, likely to take over from Wen Jiabao as prime minister in 2013, has degrees in law and economics. Other upcoming leaders are similarly schooled. Such unconstrained technocracy is no guarantee of good ideas or decisions. China’s engineer-kings threw their weight behind the Three Gorges dam, for example, despite the prophetic advice of some more eminent scientists. In the SARS epidemic in 2003, the technocrats were initially inept too, putting face-saving ahead of epidemiology. A rapid rollout of China’s high-speed rail network was followed in July by a slowdown after a fatal train crash: technocracy did not prevent corruption and poor quality-control.”

“When two of Brazil’s most powerful women, President Dilma Rousseff and supermodel Gisele Bundchen , last moth emerged as the figureheads of two opposing sides in a heated debate over sexism in advertising, it did not seem like a fair fight. After all, Ms Rousseff is ranked third on a Forbes list of the world’s most powerful women compared with number 60 for her celebrity opponent. Yet Ms Bundchen’s camp eventually came out on top in an epic battle that offers some insights into Brazil’s booming advertising world.”

“Feminists who once thought Israel's battle for gender equality had been mostly won are warning of a new assault from Israel's fast-growing ultra-Orthodox community, which is seeking to expand religious-based segregation into the public realm. ‘We are going backward and losing all our achievements,’ said Rachel Liel, executive director of the New Israel Fund, which advocates for civil rights and equality. ‘A 21st century democracy is not a place where women sit in the back of the bus.’ Israel's ranking in gender equality — based upon workplace discrimination, pay differentials and other factors — compared with other countries dropped from 36th place in 2007 to 55th in 2011, according to the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index.”

“Her eyes, all that could be seen, gleamed as she revelled in a new-found freedom. For 40 years under what she disdainfully termed the ‘liberalism’ of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the niqab had been forbidden. ‘But now we can wear what we like!’ Aliaa el-Mahdi, a 20-year-old university student in Cairo, has found a very different way to celebrate the Arab spring. She recently posted an alluring photograph on Facebook, Twitter and her personal blog. It showed herself standing unclothed, bar thigh-length stockings and a pair of bright-red shoes. The public airing of a nude self-portrait, an act of almost unheard-of daring in a conservative Arab country, stirred instant controversy, as well as more than a million page views. Ms el-Mahdi, who describes herself as an atheist, says she meant to echo ‘screams against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy’.”

“In light of the events in Maspero, it is thought that another 150,000 Copts may leave their ancestral homeland by the end of 2011. When Mr. Mubarak was in power, the Copts were frequently the victims of violent attacks and official discrimination — the New Year’s bombing of a Coptic Church in Alexandria that left 21 dead is the most recent instance. Now, with Mr. Mubarak gone, Copts fear that an elected Muslim majority is likely to prove far less tolerant than a military dictatorship. Conditions were by no means good for the Copts when Mr. Mubarak was at the helm. The most risible instance occurred in 2009 when, in an absurd effort to prevent the spread of swine flu, the government decided to slaughter all pigs in Egypt. But since neither contact with pigs nor eating pork spreads swine flu, why kill the poor pigs? The answer is very simple. Slaughtering the pigs, as it turns out, was probably meant to inconvenience the Copts who farmed them and ate them. This constituted another of those petty measures intended to harm the Copts financially. Today, Egypt is doing the same with Israel. Under the pretext of preserving its national agricultural patrimony, it has forbidden the sale of palm fronds to Israel. Palm fronds are used ceremonially by Jews during the holiday of Sukkot, and since Israel doesn’t grow enough palm trees, it imports the fronds from Egypt…. What doesn’t occur to most Egyptians is that the Copts represent a significant business community in Egypt and that their flight may further damage an economy saddled with a ballooning deficit. But this is nothing new for Egypt. The Egyptians have yet to learn the very hard lesson of the post-1956 departure of its nearly 100,000 Jews, who, at the time, constituted one of the wealthiest Jewish communities in the Mediterranean region.”

“Powered by the cash which accompanies the world’s third largest gas reserves, and bouyed by the soft power provided by Al-Jazeera, the most influential Arab news network, Qatar has become a vigorous cheerleader for the Arab spring. Its funding and weapons were critical to the downfall of the Libyan dictator, Muammer Gaddafi. Its diplomatic manoeuvring has helped isolate Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime. The state-let’s leaders have even offered to mediate in Yemen.”

“As for self-confidence, he says, ‘ordinary citizens are proud of the rise of Turkey and if you ask them who can threaten Turkey, they will say nobody.’ All the same, criticism has grown of late of Mr Davutoglu’s policy of ‘zero problems with neighbours’ -- his efforts to improve Turkey’s relations with nearby states. This year, Turkey has broken with Damascus, expelled Israel’s ambassador, locked horns with Cyprus over drilling in the eastern Mediterranean and seen an attempt to normalise relations with Armenia fade away.”

“The trial of 11 journalists - including Turkey's ‘last investigative reporter’ - begins on Tuesday (22 November) in a country which says it wants to join the EU. Nedim Sener, Ahmet Sik and nine other journalists will face the court after spending six months in pre-trial detention on charges they support Ergenekon - an alleged conspiracy against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan named after a fairy tale palace. If convicted, they will join the 63 newspaper men and women who are already in prison or the 50 journalists who live under threat of prison due to suspended sentences. The trial comes one month after Turkey arrested Ragip Zarakolu, an eminent intellectual and free speech campaigner, on charges that he collaborates with an illegal Kurdish movement, the KCK. It also comes the same day the government launches a Chinese-style Internet filter designed to block access to thousands of websites containing pornography or Kurdish ‘separatist propaganda.’”

“For the past three decades, Australia has served as a sort of early-warning system for the rise of china. To understand the effect China is having on the world, Australia has been a good place to start. Prodded by some far-sighted diplomats, Australia was one of the first countries to wake up to the economic potential of China. In 1985, then prime minister Bob Hawke took Chinese leader Hu Yaobang on a personal tour of the Pilbara, a remote stretch of Western Australia with vast deposits of iron ore. In a way, it was the start of the current commodities boom.”

“Now, the trust-based financing networks that took the place of banks in Wenzhou and fueled its binge are collapsing in the face of slowing exports, a trend made worse by Europe's economic woes. Property prices are down. Captains of local industry have fled from debts, sometimes escaping loan sharks by taking their own lives, local authorities say. Add to that strikes, heavy-handed policing, food scares and grisly score settling -- for an ‘annus horribilis’ in the Zhejiang province city of 9.1 million. Images of a bullet-train carriage dangling from a Wenzhou viaduct after a July railway collision seemed to illustrate the city's bad luck. Its stumbling local economy has much of China fretting whether trouble for Wenzhou's famously nimble manufacturers heralds broader danger.”

“China ranks 27th and Russia 28th in the 2011 index, while the Dutch, Swiss, Belgians, Germans and Japanese get the top scores. Britain and the United States rank eighth and ninth. But the Berlin-based anti-corruption campaigners said not one of the 28 countries surveyed — which include all of the G-20 — was perceived as ‘wholly clean of bribery,’ and few had made a major improvement since the last bribery index, in 2008.‘India's score improved the most … but it still remains near the bottom of the table. Canada and the United Kingdom saw the most significant deterioration in their scores,’ read the report, released this month.”

“The interview, conducted by the country's information and culture minister flanked by a phalanx of advisers and officials, comes as U.S. President Barack Obama and Asian leaders head to Indonesia for a summit at which Myanmar is seeking to boost its international reputation after decades of tough military rule. Myanmar has embarked on an ‘irreversible’ reform process, said the minister, U Kyaw Hsan, speaking for the government. He blamed U.S. sanctions for delaying the country's development and said they made Myanmar more reliant on Chinese companies. ‘When we are striving for development, we cannot be choosers -- we have accepted what is best for the country,’ he said. Since November 2010 elections that Western governments decried as a sham, the new government has surprised critics with its changes, which have included freeing dissident and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi from years of house arrest, as well as easing media reins and pushing to make Myanmar more attractive to foreign investors.”

“The talks began in recent weeks and included meetings with ethnic rebel leaders over the past weekend in an undisclosed location along the Thai-Myanmar border, according to ethnic leaders and others familiar with the meetings. The government’s goal is to convince the insurgent groups, which have long lobbied for more political rights, to fully recognize the new government and possibly lay down their arms, these people said. In return, the government offers more economic development and other incentives, they said.”

“In the months after his June 2010 election, Mr. Aquino made some striking concessions to China. The Philippines was one of the few democratic counties last year to hold back its ambassador from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony honoring the jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. A few months later, Manila angered Taiwan by honoring Beijing’s request to deport to mainland China 14 fraud suspects who hailed from Taiwan.

But the limits of Manila’s influence were revealed shortly after Mr. Aquino’s visit, when the mainland Chinese authorities executed three Filipinos accused of drug trafficking despite Mr. Aquino’s clemency pleas. The executions, and an increase in skirmishes between fishermen and naval vessels from both countries, have fueled Philippine determination to stand up to Beijing.”

“China created the Confucius Prize last year, in its fury that the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to dissident Liu Xiaobo. It's a kind of anti-Nobel, and in that sense it is meant to flatter both Mr. Putin and China's government. China's Communist Party sees a kindred soul in a man who has stayed in power in Moscow for 12 years and has designs on at least 12 more. China's other great fear is that ethnic nationalists in Tibet or Xinjiang, like democrats in Taiwan, might succeed in governing themselves. Thus does Mr. Putin, who razed the small province of Chechnya and who invaded Georgia in 2008 to teach an imperial lesson, became a hero to Chinese rulers.”

“‘Because of the Soviet legacy and the 1990s, ordinary Russians don’t trust one another,’ says James Sherr of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. ‘They don’t combine in… political activity. They opt out.’ The Arab spring has shown small sparks can produce unexpected results. If rigging is too blatant, we could yet see a test of assumptions over Russians’ passivity.”

“The whistles and shouts, heard clearly on the live television broadcast, were an unprecedented rebuke as Putin prepares to return to the presidency next year. A judo enthusiast, Putin has long been an admirer of Russian heavyweight mixed martial artist Fedor Emelianenko and came to see him take on American Jeff Monson. After Emelianenko won, Putin stepped into the ring to congratulate him, but was met with catcalls from many of the 22,000 fans at the Olympic Stadium.”

“Catherine had spent the long, lonely years at the Russian court before her enthronement educating herself broadly. She was a self-proclaimed disciple of the French philosophes, counting Montesquieu as her great inspiration and Voltaire and Diderot as correspondents, friends and beneficiaries of her largess. Early in her reign, she made an ambitious attempt to reform Russia's convoluted and outdated legal code, issuing instructions steeped in Enlightenment philosophy. But this venture, like her early desires to eliminate or, at the least, mitigate the oppressions of serfdom throughout her realm, foundered on the realities of the state she now ruled. As the czarina informed Diderot: ‘You work only on paper which accepts anything, is smooth and flexible and offers no obstacles either to your imagination or your pen, while I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more sensitive and touchy.’”

“The underlying problem remains: Germany and France are locked into their most bitter struggle since the panzers exploded out of the Ardennes Forrest in 1940. Money is one big component of the fight. The French bottom line is that Germany must help raise the carcass of the French banking system from the dead. Clueless European regulators (who accomplished the not insignificant feat of making American’s dysfunctional regulatory system look Solomonic) pushed many banks to invest in soon-to-be-worthless sovereign debt from soft euro countries like Spain, Italy and Greece. So French banks in particular are loaded to the gunwales with bonds that won’t float.”

“‘The current policy of lending plus austerity will lead to social unrest,’ Mr. Connolly told investors and policy makers at a conference held this spring in Los Angeles by the Milken Institute, arguing the case that Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain could not simply cut their way to recovery. ‘And one should not forget that of the four countries we are talking about, all have had civil wars, fascist dictatorships and revolutions. That is history,’ he concluded, his voice rising above the chortles and gasps coming from the audience and the Europeans on his panel. ‘And that is the future if this malignant lunacy of monetary union is pursued and crushes these countries into the ground.’ Mr. Connolly has been warning for years that Europe was heading for disaster. As a European Union economist in the early 1990s, he helped design the common currency’s framework, but then he was dismissed after he expressed turncoat views.”

“The Prussian reforms of 1808 to 1812 granted all citizens freedom of trade, and put an end to serfdom and what until then had been utterly unchecked arbitrariness towards the Jews. The Jews were still only allowed to become public servants in exceptional cases and certainly never officers in the military, but unlike the Christian majority, they made the most of the new opportunities. They emancipated themselves and at high speed. Germany, with its half-hearted reformism, sluggish economic development (until 1870), and strong legal security provided a fertile ground. To top it all, Germany had some of the best Gymnasiums and universities in Europe, as well as some of the worst primary education. Unlike the majority of their Christian and still largely illiterate peers, Jewish boys as a rule had always been taught to read and write Hebrew. Their parents did not put silver spoons in their cradles, but all manner of educational nourishment. Jewish parents knew exactly how much cultural skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic would improve their children's chances, whereas Christian parents and clerics were still claiming, right up into the 20th century, that ‘reading is bad for the eyes!’”

“For Americans, the scenario I’ve just imagined is a paranoid fantasy, the kind of New World Order nightmare that haunts the sleep of black-helicopter watchers and Trilateral Commission obsessives. But for the inhabitants of Italy and Greece, who have just watched democratically elected governments toppled by pressure from financiers, European Union bureaucrats and foreign heads of state, it evokes the cold reality of 21st-century politics. Democracy may be nice in theory, but in a time of crisis it’s the technocrats who really get to call the shots. National sovereignty is a pretty concept, but the survival of the European common currency comes first.”

“The most powerful description of what has gone wrong in western societies was laid out by the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck in the New Left Review. He argues that full employment policies of the golden age of social democracy caused the voting public’s measures of the proper allocation of resources to diverge widely from market measures. Meeting both measures required more resources than governments could get their hands on. The filled the gap through various tricks: inflations, deficit financing, deregulated private credit and now the public commandeering of private resources for bail-out programmes.”

“The European leaders would come together for a summit and issue a joint communiqué. But then if you sampled the coverage in each of the national medias, you felt as though you were reading about 12 entirely different events. Europe was unifying legalistically and economically, but there was no common language or common conversation. At one meeting, leaders embraced ‘federalism,’ but that word meant one thing in Britain and another thing in Germany. Then there was the elitism. Off the record, Europe’s technocrats would say the most blatantly condescending things: History had taught them that Europe’s peoples were not to be trusted and government should be run from the top by people like themselves. As a consequence, European integration was opaque, and consisted of a long series of complicated fudges.”

“Technocrats are supposed to have the mysterious authority of being above politics. But there is no ‘above politics’. The crisis is political all the way through. The problems both countries face are not technocratic. The measures that must be taken are obvious enough: regain control of public finances, restart demand and make the two southern economies competitive again. The problem is political….”

“There are examples of monetary unions that have worked, but these have been accompanied by political union. Italy and Germany provide contrasting examples. In 1818 the German states formed the Zollverein, a customs union that was complete by 1833. Railway construction followed and powered economic convergence. Political union came in 1871 and a single currency followed. Italy was unified about the same time under the Risorgimento but full economic unification was not achieved. Railway construction was opposed by the Papal States, impeding integration, and the imposition of the lira meant that southern Italy, never as economically successful as the north, could not become competitive.”

“Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict, which comes into force in the UK next month. Last night, critics claimed the EU was at odds with both science and common sense. Conservative MEP Roger Helmer said: ‘This is stupidity writ large. The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are: highly-paid, highly-pensioned officials worrying about the obvious qualities of water and trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true.’”

“Today, Nickson said, these management groups aren't doing a very good job of restoring tuna populations and making sure they can be fished sustainability. One of them is the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, which oversees more than 60 percent of the world's tuna catch. Its members include Pacific island nations and the homes of the world's large industrial fishing fleets - the U.S., Europe, Japan, China and Taiwan. Nickson said it's a David vs. Goliath matchup of island nations pushing for sustainable management vs. the large fishing nations, which block the restrictions needed to achieve it. The group's next meeting is in December in the island nation of Palau. The Pew Environment Group is pressing it to set limits on the amount of fish caught for each species; to take action to protect sharks, which are unintentionally caught along with tuna; and to reduce the catch of juvenile bigeye tuna, an overfished species, by ships fishing for skipjack tuna. Skipjack, the most common tropical tuna, is very heavily fished in some places, but isn't yet overfished, said William Fox, a biologist and the World Wildlife Fund's U.S. vice president for fisheries. Skipjack is the only tuna species that hasn't been fished to its maximum limit or overfished, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.”

“Many thanks, M Houellebecq, for deftly explaining your motives, and the book’s title, in your first letter: ‘We have, as they say, nothing in common – except for one essential trait: we are both rather contemptible individuals.’ Non-French readers might demur, given your friend Lévy’s three dozen, mostly erudite, books and his high-profile involvement in admirable causes from Bosnia to Libya. Or your own recent Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary gong, for your novel The Map and the Territory. In France, however, you are both widely reviled. M Lévy – can I call you BHL? Everyone else does – you are derided for your media-saturated, champagne-socialist lifestyle and the bespoke white shirts that expose much of your perpetually tanned, 63-year-old torso. As for you, M Houellebecq, your old-git grumpiness (after only 53 years on this earth) and your run-ins with Islam and women have won few French admirers. Reluctantly but correctly, you describe BHL’s image as ‘a philosopher without an original idea but with excellent contacts’ and your own as a ‘nihilist, reactionary, cynic, racist, shameless misogynist ... an unremarkable author with no style’.”

“Beckett was always dismissive of his work as a courier in the French Resistance, when he was often on the point of capture, describing it as ‘boy scout stuff.’ But of course the experience marked him. He felt that whatever would subsequently befall him was, in a sense, trivial in comparison with what had happened to so many in those terrible times. (Many of the members of his Resistance group, ‘Gloria,’ were arrested, tortured and deported to Buchenwald or Mauthausen.) After the liberation, he worked for the Irish Red Cross in Brittany and then returned to Paris to take up his old life as an impecunious freelance writer, with his companion, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, who had been with him throughout the war years. There are other reasons for the new, more restrained tone of the subsequent letters. For one thing, Beckett's mother, from whom he had spent so much of his early life trying to escape, was increasingly ill, which necessitated repeated visits to Dublin and a reappraisal of their intense relationship. He was also starting to write in French, discovering in the process a less linguistically brilliant but more profound vein.”

“Kennan barely managed acceptance to Princeton University but proved to be a good student, though a social misfit disconnected from the culture of the elite eating clubs. The experience established another template for Kennan's life -- that of the loner dedicated to hard work but inclined to tell uncomfortable truths to superiors who did not want to hear them. By joining the Foreign Service in the mid-1920s, Kennan became a member of the first generation of professionally trained Russian hands. He emerged from the experience fascinated with the Russia of Chekhov and Tolstoy and feeling contempt for Soviet communism. He watched an emerging Stalinist despotism from the U.S. listening post in Riga, Latvia, then studied advanced Russian in Berlin.”

“Demand for 35mm cinema film is projected to fall from a peak of 13bn feet a year in 2008 to as little as 4bn by 2012, HIS said. There will be no more ‘mainstream’ 35mm usage in the US after 2013, with the format expected to be phased out worldwide by 2015. Its demise will be mourned by directors and actors who have spent their careers shooting movies on 35mm film. ‘I will remain loyal to this analogue art form until the last lab closes,’ said Steven Spielberg in a recent tribute to celluloid, while French new wave director Jean-Luc Godard had a haughtier view of digital projection. ‘The so-called digital is not a mere technical medium but a medium of thought,’ he mused. ‘And when modern democracies turn technical thought into a separate domain, those modern democracies incline towards totalitarianism.’”

“When I started as a film critic online at Salon.com, readers could click on a link that allowed them to e-mail me directly. Within a month, I heard from more readers than I had in a decade as a print critic. Not all the letters were nice (though the rude writers often apologized if you wrote back to them and reminded them a person was on the other end of their missive), but I felt in touch with my readers. There was also an edited letters column. That all ended when the publication made it possible for readers to post directly without going through an editor. Almost immediately, I and the other writers I knew stopped hearing directly from readers. Instead, instant posting became survival of the loudest. Posturing and haranguing ruled. If the writer was female or Jewish, misogynists and anti-Semites would turn up. Why wouldn’t they? There was no editor to stop them. Bullies and bigots seized the chance to show off. And those reasonable people, the ones I and my colleagues heard from? They went nowhere near the online forums.”

“The financially stable countries are in the position of repeat negotiators who do not want to bear even part of the cost of other countries' overspending. At the same time there is a secondary bargain going on in each country as to how to share the burden of lowered expectations, or even austerity, between current workers and retirees. The retirees, like the foreign banks and governments, need the workers to get down to work, and the workers, meanwhile, sense that they, like the NBA stars, might actually be better off by threatening to work less rather than more. Once the eurozone is stabilized, or contracted, it will be time for the International Monetary Fund, or the most stable countries, to devise some tax or penalty system that discourages countries from trying this tactic again. If they do not do so, we are in for decades of bailouts and crises, as we are for interruptions in professional sports.”

“With her open ears and powerful, elastic voice, it is hardly surprising that Khan broke through the rock ’n’ soul Rush Street scene of the early 1970s. When the underchampioned 350-pound Baby Huey (James Ramey) died in 1970, Khan replaced him in the Babysitters, an electric soul band that played Rush Street. This caught the attention of the American Breed, a successful South Side pop group that was starting to splinter. The American Breed had 1967 national pop hits with ‘Bend Me, Shape Me’ and ‘Step Out Of Your Mind.’ Breed guitarist Al Ciner and keyboardist Kevin Murphy stepped out to form a new group called Ask Rufus. ‘I never sang with the Breed,’ Khan said, ‘but I don’t think [Ask Rufus] had been together a year when Paulette [McWilliams, the vocalist] quit and I got in the band. I was working the Rush Street circuit with the Babysitters, playing Nero’s Pit and Dante’s Inferno…. Rufus was playing the Rush Up… When I had a break I went to see Rufus, and when they had a break they’d come over to see me. We became fast friends before we worked together. Because they had been an established group before Rufus, they were getting better gigs and money, so yeah, I had no problem joining.’ Chicago saxophone player Bobby Baker was in the Babysitters for Khan’s audition in 1971. In an email he recalled, ‘She sat right next to me when she sang and after I heard her voice, I said to her, ‘You got it baby.’ These were the only words I ever said to Chaka Khan.’ He saw her another time when he sat in during a Rufus rehearsal. ‘Six months later,’ he recalled, ‘Rufus and Chaka Khan were off to Hollywood becoming famous and rich.’ …American Breed/Ask Rufus guitarist Al Ciner said, ‘Rotary Connection [with Minnie Riperton] played Rush Street. The Exceptions. That’s where Pete Cetera came from. He was the bass player before he went with CTA [which became Chicago]. We were more of a rock and R&B thing.’”

***

Thanks to Jay Babcock, Chris Woods, Steve Beeho.

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• The New Vulgate• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Vann Gray, David Lightbourne• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer